Russian · Русский

About Russian

Language family

Indo-European, Balto-Slavic, East Slavic

Where it's spoken

Russia and widely across the former Soviet Union

Speakers

roughly 150 million native speakers and 258 million total

Russian developed from Old East Slavic, the common ancestor it shares with Ukrainian and Belarusian, and was shaped into its modern literary form largely during the 18th and 19th centuries by writers such as Pushkin. It is written in the Cyrillic alphabet, adapted from the Greek alphabet by medieval Slavic missionaries. As the primary language of the Soviet Union, it remains a widely understood second language across Central Asia and the Caucasus.